


The Children in Our Hearts

by Lupin_Smiled



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Animagus, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Depression, Dumbledore Bashing, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Smut, F/M, James Potter Being an Asshole, M/M, Minor Lily Evans Potter/Severus Snape, One-Sided Attraction, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Pre-Canon, Remus Lupin Needs a Hug, Severus Snape Being a Bastard, Sirius Black & James Potter Friendship, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Werewolf Politics, Werewolf Reveal, Young Love, Young Remus Lupin, Young Sirius Black
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 04:50:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14686842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lupin_Smiled/pseuds/Lupin_Smiled
Summary: Remus Lupin is just eleven years old when Albus Dumbledore turns up at his home, offers to play gobstones, and offers him a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.





	The Children in Our Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> I plan for this to be a very long fic. Comment, let me know what you think.

Lyall Lupin was quite proud to say that he lived a charmed, pleasant life. Not wealthy, in any sense of the word, but he was well-off, and he and his wife had not a worry as far as home and money were concerned. Life outside of their happy home was grim, but when he was with his wife and child, he had the ability to block out the building army, the death, the destruction around them. 

Lyall Lupin was not a particularly vocal or outgoing man; he did his best to remain quiet and observant and to build his mind, not his reputation. Though his reputation did now precede him, in of that he’d become something of a famous expert on Non-Human Spirituous Apparitions (things such as poltergeists and Boggarts). The knowledge he had gained in these areas, in dealing with creatures of dark magic and darker origin, had not only introduced him to his prim and lovely wife, Hope, but also to the job that he now held in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. (He had some particularly interesting stories from these jobs, and the knowledge of who he was and what he did had grown, but Lyall did not particularly care to brag about his accomplishments. His life was good enough without all of that.) His intelligence and his career were a source of pride, and he was content in his life.

Early morning in January of 1965, the sixteenth of the month, greeted Lyall with a cold breeze as he woke from his slumber. Pushing his bedding back from himself, while still covering his sleeping wife, Lyall stood and approached the window near their bed. Snow was fluttering in the breeze, dusting the rooftops of the houses nearby with a light, powdery coat of white. A chill blew through the small crack between the window and the windowsill, causing the faded blue curtains to shift gently. Cold, he decided, but ultimately not less than beautiful. He had always had a particular fondness for the colder months.

Turning away from the window, he approached the bed again and brushed his lips against Hope’s soft blonde hair. A little murmur of breath slipped through her lips, but she otherwise didn’t stir, and Lyall left their bedroom, walking down the short hallway to the last door on the left side of the hallway. The door gave a small squeak as Lyall pushed it open. The barely risen sun poured light into the window, highlighting the very small bed and the smaller child fast asleep on it. 

As much as Lyall loved Hope, he loved his son, Remus, more. Remus was on the cusp of turning five, and was a stunningly bright boy, having inherited his father’s intelligence as well as his mother’s sensitivity and compassion. He was a charming child, sweet and warm and open, and, somewhere in the past four years, he had wrapped Lyall around his fingers. He would be a very gifted young man once he started learning more about the world he lived in— if any of them survived long enough for Remus to see adulthood. Lyall shook the dark thoughts away, closing his son’s bedroom door and retreating to his bedroom to dress for his day at work.

He didn’t want to think of those dark whispers, of the Dark Lord gaining power and building an army. The whispers that the deaths and the murders were increasing in numbers and that the armies were turning dark creatures to their side. He wanted to ignore those things and focus on his own life, his wife and his child, and the world they were creating together. That wasn’t a choice for Lyall Lupin, who had accepted the position he had based on those same dark whispers. If dark creatures were doing evil things, it was Lyall’s job to handle them, to lessen the ranks of the Dark Lord’s army.

His morning continued with breakfast, and then the trip to work, Apparating to the Ministry of Magic itself. The sensation of Apparating would never quite fade, the way it sort of felt like he was being forced through a very small tube until it spit him out at his destination, and he didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it was the quickest and most efficient way to travel. Rubbing the thumb of his left hand, which felt as though it had debated staying at home for the day, Lyall wandered into the Ministry, pulling the briefings for the day form the confines of his seemingly-bottomless briefcase. He truly loved magic for its’ level of efficiency, even if it often made things as difficult as it made other things simple.

“Ah, Lupin!” a high-pitched, chirpy voice trilled as Lyall proceeded down the halls towards his office, and Lyall startled from his distractions. So abruptly, in fact, that he bumped into a rather small and stern-looking young witch, very nearly knocking her over in the process.

“Sorry—” Lyall murmured as he helped to steady her. She gave him an affronted look before she vanished, and, with a sigh, Lyall turned his attention in the direction of the voice that had startled him. He didn’t need to look; he knew his boss’s voice well enough by now that he could pick it from a crowd of thousands.

Minister of Magic Nobby Leach was a tall, thin man who looked like he could blow away if you simply breathed too hard in his direction. His hair was washed out blonde, and he had piercing gray eyes. His lips were curled into a thin smile that caused his large nose to scrunch up. Nobby was a rather erratic and nervous looking man, but he was personally much stronger and smarter than he was given credit for, as well as being the first Muggle-born person to ever hold the office of Minister of Magic. Perhaps the anxiety that flitted in and out of those shadowy gray eyes was not misplaced, the way pureblood wizards treated Muggle-borns. The deaths at the hands of the Dark Lord and his followers plagued Lyall’s mind once again, and once again, he persisted in pushing them away.

“Minister,” he greeted pleasantly, falling into step beside the man. “How was your morning?” It was politics, an act of kindness. Lyall and the minister were not friends, but they got along well enough, and Lyall had no reason to dislike him.

“No different than normal” the minister replied, waving a hand urgently. “Half of my staff insists on furthering the protections and the fight against You-Know-Who, which has done us as much good as it has, and the other half think he’s got the right idea and I should be on the receiving end of his spells next.” He exhaled a laugh, but it was high, wavering. Lyall extended a hand in comfort, squeezing the minister’s shoulder. 

“You will be fine,” he assured the man in a soothing tone. “Think of other things, Minister. Such as this trial.” He raised his papers, the briefing for the trial he was to prepare for. “Fenrir Greyback. What was he brought in for, do you know?” 

“Ah, yes, of course,” Leach replied, nodding once. He seemed relieved with the change of subject. Lyall didn't blame him. “He was assumed to be traveling with a werewolf pack. Two Muggle children were killed, and he was brought in for questioning in their deaths. If he is a werewolf, it’s something you will take care of.”

“Indeed,” Lyall agreed as they squeezed between a relatively large wizard that smelled like butterbeer, and a tall, gangly witch with very frizzy hair that added three inches to her height. They stepped into the lift, and then were off to the lower levels where the trial would be held. “Werewolves. They deserve to die, the whole lot of them. Disgusting creatures.”

“Now, now, Lupin,” Leach chastised, patting the back of Lyall’s shoulder with all the force of a wet piece of parchment. “You cannot paint all of them with the same brush, so to speak. They did not choose their state, anymore than I chose to be born to Muggles.”

Lyall sniffed, but deigned not to answer. His opinions of werewolves would not be changed. He’d studied them long enough to have reason not to like them; they murdered, they fed on children, and they were soulless. He would not be shifted from his stance. Leach was not the person he could sway on the subject either way; he was quite as stubborn as he was anxiety-riddled, and, in his own right, he brought up fair points. Lyall remained silent as the lift stuttered to a stop, and he, the Minister, and the fat wizard, stepped off of it and into the chambers that housed the trial.

Lyall took his seat in the back row on the Eastern side of the room, facing the space where Fenrir Greyback was dragged in, snarling at the bonds that retained him. Questioning progressed, and Lyall paid little attention, blocking out the words. Words held lies; behavior, from what he knew, didn’t. So Lyall watched, taking in the man’s haggard appearance, his sharpened teeth and yellowed nails. His skin was pale and colorless, and there was a darkness in his eyes, a sort of amused madness that set Lyall on edge where he sat.

Lyall did not recognize the name of Fenrir Greyback from the Werewolf Register that they had kept, but even the thought of that so-called Registry had him scoffing internally. He didn’t think he knew something in the Ministry that had been so poorly maintained; just because Fenrir Greyback’s name wasn’t on it didn’t mean that he wasn’t a werewolf. Newt Scamander had meant well in making it; the Ministry had simply failed to uphold it.

The committee, however, seemed to believe that Greyback was innocent. He barely listened to the story that Greyback spun, mostly because he didn’t need to. He knew the signs, and he was… nearly positive that Fenrir Greyback was a werewolf. Just as he was nearly positive that Fenrir Greyback had been involved in the attack and murders of two very small, innocent Muggle children. Filthy, terrible creatures, werewolves. Lyall didn’t know how these people bought it.

“He is a werewolf,” Lyall said distinctly, effectively cutting off the words that Fenrir Greyback had started to say. He didn’t raise his voice to anything more than a gentle murmur; it was enough to focus all eyes in the room on him. Some were questioning, some were judgemental. But there would always be people in this committee who looked down upon Lyall for having a Muggle wife. It didn’t make his knowledge any less present, and it didn’t stop him from being right. He knew the signs, how a werewolf would look twenty-four hours before the full moon, as it was currently. 

“What are you on about, Lupin?” Abraxas Malfoy sneered, and Lyall looked at him, his eyes boring into the other man’s. The Malfoy family, Lupin held in approximately the same regard that he held werewolves. They were the worst kind of pureblood family, and the way those icy blue eyes seemed to see through everything, look through people instead of at them, like they thought they were better than, higher than all others. Abraxas Malfoy held himself as superior to Lyall Lupin, because Lyall had wed a Muggle and had a son, whereas Abraxas and his pureblood wife had, as far as the Malfoy family was concerned, the perfect son in little Lucius. He was five years older than Remus, and Lyall hated the Malfoys just enough to want to prove that Remus was still smarter, but he refused to resort to that level of pettiness. 

“Perhaps he’s not on the Werewolf Register, and perhaps he is telling the truth,” Lyall replied coolly, in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe the words he was saying anymore than he’d believed the words that Greyback had spoken only moments before. “If so, there’s no harm in keeping him in confinement during the full moon. That’s only twenty-four hours.”

He believed it to be a sound theory, himself. If Greyback wasn’t a werewolf, than there was nothing to be lost from his being confined for twenty four hours. It would be simple, an easy way to prove himself right or wrong. Lyall was not so arrogant as to think he could never be wrong, but he had a very strong feeling that he wasn’t wrong about this. If he wasn’t wrong about this, releasing this man would prove to be very dangerous for too many people. Lyall did not want blood on his conscience. 

A sharp, cruel laugh filled the room, echoing off the curved walls and the high ceiling, and Lyall’s back stiffened. The voice was sharp and grating, and Lyall did not need to look to know that Abraxas Malfoy would be sneering and smirking at him, like this was not a sound idea. And once he started to laugh, the others did, too, collectively rendering Lyall’s years of study and service in the containment and regulation of dark and dangerous creatures entirely useless. Fury began to boil in the pit of his stomach, all-consuming and entirely, utterly mind-numbing. His focus was narrowed to a fixed point in the center of the room— at the moment, that fixed point for his fury and embarrassment became Fenrir Greyback.

Lyall stood so rapidly that he knocked a dark-skinned witch sitting beside him off her chair. His rage clouded out any desire to be polite; laughter ended abruptly. The last echo of it rung around the room, dangerous and lingering, like a threat. “Werewolves,” he spat, eyes flashing between Greyback, the Minister of Magic, and Abraxas Malfoy so rapidly that his vision blurred between the three. “Wretched creatures. Soulless, evil, deserving of death—” The words were torn from his lips like a hand had reached down his throat and dragged them out, scratching into his throat as they did.

The Minister did not take too kindly to Lyall’s outburst, and Lyall himself was starting to regret it. He believed what he said, and he had believed it for a rather long time, but to say something so publicly was near demanding repercussions. The heat in his stomach died in an instant, replaced with a sensation of cool, icy dread. Two broad shouldered guards, wands drawn, grabbed Lyall by the shoulders and dragged him from the room of the trial, and Lyall went without a fight, glancing back over his shoulder. Abraxas Malfoy was grinning, and Lyall swore under his breath. How foolish had he been to allow the man under his skin in such a way, and what would the fallout be?

Lyall would return home defeated, many hours later after pleading with the Minister for the safety of his career, body cold and exhausted. Hope was already cooking dinner, humming to herself as she cut up vegetables by the stove. At the table, Remus sat dutifully, until he heard the door shutting. With a pitter-patter of tiny feet, and a small, childish laugh, the child ran to Lyall, who bent to meet him in a hug. The day had not been easy, but seeing his wife and child made things feel simpler in their way, less dire, less grim. The child in his arms could chase away all the bad in the world with a simple smile. 

“How was work, dear?” Hope asked from the stove, and there’s a smile in her voice that faded when Lyall told her that they’ll talk about it some other time. (Which was code for, a time when Remus was not awake to overhear. The boy didn’t need to know the things that happened inside the Ministry of Magic, and the way things seemed to get slightly worse day by day.) She nodded and turned back to the food on the stove.

Later, when Remus was fast asleep in his bed, Lyall and Hope would discuss werewolves and the threat they held to society. Hope, much more sincere and often compassionate than Lyall himself, did not share some of his more… prejudiced views on the matter. Sitting together, a mug of tea between her palms, she tilted her head slightly to the left and looked at him with curious brown eyes, eyes that were sprinkled with gray, sparkling like jewels in the low light of the room. Remus shared those eyes with her.

“I don’t trust that all werewolves are dark, or soulless, or evil,” she told him calmly, running her thumb over the smooth surface of the mug she was holding. “I think that the ones that are bad are the ones you hear about the most, yes, but they don’t choose what they are and they can’t control what they become. I do believe that many who had the curse would lose it, if that were an option, but it’s not. Why judge the person for the sin they can’t control?”

“They aren’t people,” Lyall responded, voice coming out too sharp in the quiet room. He took a deep breath and forced the flashes of anger to fade. Sometimes his temper got the better of him, and he didn’t always handle it as he should have. Snapping about it wasn’t going to change what had happened and what had been said.

“They are people,” Hope replied softly, releasing the mug so she could take Lyall’s hand in her own. Her hands were soft, much smaller than his, but the touch was warmth and comfort, and Lyall exhaled the last of the breath that he had been holding. “People who, like anyone with a sickness, didn’t choose to be inflicted with that sickness. Some of them do terrible things on purpose, but humanity in general can do terrible things on purpose. Is You-Know-Who a werewolf? No, and he does terrible things as a human. Allowing you judgement for one to cloud your judgement for all is not the same intelligence of the man I married.”

Lyall’s eyes found where their hands were joined, her smaller, thinner fingers laced with his own. She was not wrong. He was not too prideful to admit that, and he hoped that, if Remus inherited anything from him, it was his ability to admit that he could be wrong. If everything else came from Hope, Lyall wouldn’t mind that in the slightest. She balanced him in many ways, and, in such times when he wasn’t thinking clearly, she acted as his voice of reason. He had been lucky to find her, luckier still that she had accepted the strange and unbelievable world he lived in. She’d been employed at an insurance agency when they met. She’d had every reason to think he was insane, but she’d believed, and she’d loved.

“I’m lucky to have married you,” Lyall told Hope, and got a smile in response, before the softest brush of lips. That would see the end of their conversation, as the tea mugs were returned to the sink to be washed in the morning, and they retired for bed. It had been on a long day, and exhaustion wore Lyall down, the tiredness settling into the space between his bones. A night’s rest seemed like a good idea, and so he settled into bed with his wife for the evening. 

January came and went in blistering cold and snow, much to the dismay of many a witch and wizard who were quite tired of the ice that coated the streets. Many of them could melt it with just a flick of their wand, but that didn’t make it any less convenient for the lot of them. Cold and ice simply weren’t good for business most of the time, and many found themselves longing for any sort of signs of spring. 

Most of January ended up dedicated to finding Fenrir Greyback, who had escaped capture before his memory of his trial could be erased. This led to a rather pale and rueful Minister Leach pulling Lyall aside when he returned to work to inform him that, perhaps he had been right after all. Lyall, who would have greatly liked the opportunity to revel in his being correct (or at least make some rather unbecoming comments on the topic to Abraxas Malfoy), found himself with little time to do either. Fenrir Greyback had escaped. Fenrir Greyback had escaped, and he was a werewolf.

A werewolf, it seemed, who had every reason to be angry at Lyall.

In the following days of January, Lyall threw all his time and resources into finding the werewolf. He got to work early and left late most evenings. The consequence was that he never saw his wife or son, both of whom were asleep when he left, and had already returned to sleep by the time he got home. Hope, he knew, was unhappy with the circumstances. Remus probably didn’t truly understand them. As he ate the cold leftovers Hope had left for him, Lyall told himself that it would be worth it, to keep his family safe from the dangers that this werewolf could pose to them. He’d fix the damage he was doing to the family after that.

As the days grew grayer and bleaker, fading into the chilled mornings of February, Lyall’s hopes fell. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Fenrir Greyback knew how to avoid capture; Lyall highly doubted that this was the first time he’d had to do as such. He seemed quite proficient in it. 

Lyall remembered the night with shocking clarity. Remus would say, for years to come, that he didn’t remember much of it; Lyall wasn’t sure if that was honest or not. He never pressed. Tuesday, February sixteenth, he’d returned home from work early. Not without protest; it was the night of a full moon, and Greyback was still very much on the loose, but he’d missed Valentine’s Day with his family and was in no position to protest when Hope said she wanted him home by precisely six that evening, and not a minute later. He returned at five fifty-seven to the smell of dinner being cooked, and the sounds of Hope singing along to the old radio in the kitchen. He could also hear Remus, giggling softly, and the sound made him smile.

He set his paperwork down and joined his family in the kitchen for a nice dinner, their first together in nearly a month. The night seemed to be going very well; Remus had broken one of the lamps with a bit of uncontrolled magic very early on in the day, but Hope had taken care of it. Deciding that Remus looked appropriately abashed, Lyall opted not to punish him for it. He was just a child, after all, and an untrained wizard. There was really no need to push it.

At nine forty-seven, Lyall tucked Remus into his bed for the night. Seventeen minutes past his bedtime, yes, but Lyall felt guilty that he hadn’t spent as much time with his son as he likely should have in the past few weeks. He tucked the blanket under his chin and pressed a light kiss to the soft, sandy brown hair, smiling serenely. Remus smiled back, and for a moment, all was right in the world. 

Just a moment. Nothing good ever truly lasts.

“It’s cold,” Remus pointed out softly, tugging his blankets up farther and borrowing himself underneath them. And so it was. The window, it turned out, had the slightest bit of a crack in it. Nothing too dangerous, Lyall presumed, so he decided he would leave it for morning, instead fetching Remus another blanket for the night. This seemed to appease the child, who smiled sleepily and rolled onto his side. He was asleep within minutes. 

Not stopping to repair the window would live perhaps as Lyall’s greatest regret for the rest of his life. He would never remember the exact time on the clock when he woke up to the noises from down the hallway-- 12:48, or somewhere in that zone. He hadn’t bothered to look closely as he’d flung open his bedroom door to rush down the hallway to the bedroom where his son slept. 

It didn’t matter how quickly he acted. It didn’t matter how fast he’d gotten into that room. He was too late. His spell would knock Greyback through the window that was standing broken, little shards of glass glinting under the silvery light of the full moon. Remus was stirring feebly, not awake, but seemingly alive. Lyall approached the window, lighting his wand and raising it into the night, but neither the light from his wand, nor the moon, offered him any sight of the werewolf who had attacked his son.

Breathing hard, overwhelmed with panic, Lyall rushed back to the bed. The child was breathing, soft, shallow breaths and little, tiny gasps of air. He was alive, but he was bloody, his neck and sleep clothing spotted with wet red spots. Blood had dripped onto the sheets and pillow, too, making the whole scene look terrifying and desolate. How had the child survived such a loss of blood? These were questions that Lyall didn’t know how to answer.

“I'll send for a healer, Lyall!” Hope said shrilly from the doorway, voice tight with fear, as she rushed into the room. Lyall waved his wand over the wounds urgently. 

They sent for healers, and they had Remus looked at multiple times over the next few days, staying in dingy hotels over the period of time while they were looking into the attack. They couldn’t stay in their home and give Greyback the chance to come back… The next time, Remus wouldn’t survive, and Lyall would not live without his son. 

But his greatest fear had come to pass, and he knew, distantly, that he’d never quite be able to handle it. Healthy in spite of the blood loss, and alive though he was, Remus’ life had changed drastically, and Lyall’s and Hope’s right along with it. They could see quite as many healers as they liked, and they could beg and barter for a cure until the inevitable rise of the Dark Lord himself. What they would hear wouldn’t change any. It was as if someone had reached directly into his nightmares. Due to his own hubris and inability to keep his mouth shut, the thing he’d hated most had taken his anger out on the thing Lyall loved the most. 

Their son, the light of Lyall’s life, Remus John Lupin, was a werewolf.


End file.
